Statement by
the Communist Party of Iran (MLM) on the occasion of May First, the
International Working Class Day

May First, this year
comes at a time when Iran as well as the world are at the threshold of
unprecedented events and upheavals. A situation is developing that holds great
dangers for majority of the people in Iran and around the world. But within
this same situation, resides important opportunities to be seized for radical
change in an emancipatory direction, in Iran, in the Middle East and around the
world  towards a direction that tremendous
sacrifice and struggles of the
masses of people, under the leadership of communists would be able to beat back
the reactionary states and imperialist powers in many countries and deal blows
and defeat them, advancing in leaps and bound, thus bringing into being a new
day in the world, within which new communist revolutions would prevail and new socialist states are established in
different corners of the world. Only by recognizing these opportunities and
actuating them we can confront massive dangers ahead.

The imperialist capitalist
system in its everyday workings hurls more people into misery and terror. The
number of hungry and war-stricken is rising, the global warming continues, and
the world is continuously standing at the threshold of fear and threat of outbreak
of new wars and new rounds of people being slaughtered. In the United States,
the Trump /Pence regime is changing the regime of bourgeois democracy and establishing a Christian Fascist
regime, instead. If this regime manages to consolidate itself, it will impose a
world on people which is more racist, more misogynist, and poorer and will
intensify the destructive wars and destruction of the environment. Even before
ascent of Trump/Pence regime, the workings of global capitalist system and
policies of various imperialist powers, including the US imperialism, had
already turned the Middle East into a battlefield
of Islamist warlords, the reactionary
states of the region and the imperialist
armies. But under the rule of Tramp regime, the situation in the Middle East
will become even more intense. Economic and political rivalries among the imperialist
powers (the United States, Russia, China and the European Union) are intensifying.
These rivalries have fanned the flames of proxy wars in places such as Syria
and have made situation in those places more complex, with no end in sight. In wars
going on in Syria and Yemen, in addition to the imperialist powers, several
reactionary regional powers such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and
various Shiite and Sunni Islamist groups, are relentlessly slaughtering people
and scorching their lands. The rise of a fascist regime in the United States
has helped growth of fascist political forces in Europe. In several European
countries, including Germany, France, Poland, and
Hungary, extreme right parties are expanding their power and influence.

The situation in Iran is not
isolated from the international scene and in fact is principally shaped by the international
trends. The political power in the Islamic Republic has lost its coherence.
Meanwhile, the regime is still feeling the aftershocks of the uprising of the
poor in December 2017. Moreover, wave upon waves of protests, strikes, and demonstrations coming from the workers'
movement, teachers and pensioners, the Women of the Revolution Square (as the
young women who stood in the Revolution Square and took off and flagged their Hejab are called), farmers of Isfahan (protesting over
water shortage) and people of Khuzestan (protesting over air pollution as well
as against outrages committed by the regime against the Arab people in Khuzestan),
have encountered the regime with actual possibility of economic and social
collapse and large mass movements and uprisings. The situation is so critical
that a number of high ranking officials and security executives of the Islamic Republic
regime have openly pronounced their fear of regime collapsing or being overthrown and lacking any clear view of what will
happen to them in the year 2018. The Islamic Republic tried to remedy
its economic and political crisis by entering into a nuclear deal with the imperialist
powers. But this has failed to produce stability for the regime. John Bolton's installment as the national security adviser to
Trump/Pence regime has not only opened a new chapter of pressuring and
restricting the Islamic Republic, but it aims to further pull Iran into quagmire
of Middle East wars and even spread these wars into Iran.

The reactionary regime of the
Islamic Republic of Iran claims that through its war crimes and criminal
involvement in the Syrian war and its defense of the reactionary regime of
Bashar al-Assad it has protected Iran from the conflicts in the Middle East. But what set Iran at risk of so called
becoming Syrianized is exactly the regime itself
and the very system of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic's various
military and security factions compete with each other within Iran over
monopolizing territory, natural resources and high executive posts. At the same
time, the US imperialism, by relying on its affiliated forces, is preparing a "regime change" in Iran. Within the
framework of this kind of tense and charged situation, any eventful development, such as direct
military confrontation between the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia with
the Islamic Republic or a coup attempt
by any of the various factions in the Islamic Republic against each other and violent
suppression of the people  all with the aim of reconstituting a new hard core
of power in the Islamic Republic, can open doors to a process similar to what
have been going on in Syria or Libya in
the past several years.

Let Us
Prepare for Big Battles

In this kind of charged situation,
having any illusions and political ambiguity, not being able to make a scientific
analysis and fail to rise to challenges of the time with a revolutionary line based
on reality, can lead to destruction of progressive forces and elimination of
previous revolutionary hard work. We have to analyze the situation as deep as
possible, grasp its "unusual" character and recognize the possibility
of dangerous shifts in the situation. The true meaning of the "Syrianization"disaster is that the masses of people would
come to streets and rise up against their conditions of oppression and
exploitation, but the effective actors on the scene would be various reactionary
forces coming from the inside and outside of the Islamic Republic regime.
This aspect of the situation has to be changed urgently and immediately. This
is the political necessity/task of the present situation. Opening a radically
different path in front of the masses  a path whose economic, political,
social and cultural objectives and frameworks are determined by an actual
communist revolution, attracting significant number of masses to this path
from amongst those who have joined different sites of struggle and resistance
against the Islamic Republic, is the necessity to meet in order to be able to
deal with great dangers.

In 2017, hundreds of cases (according to some estimates 900
cases) of protest, strikes, rallies and labor demonstrations took place in
various cities and regions of Iran. Such an increase shows both the severity of
the state of affairs of the regime and also the potential of the people for
protest and struggle. But the scope and number of these struggles, their
persistence, their courage, their initiatives and their insistence on achieving
their economic and other rights and demands are still far from what workers
actually need.

The dire political and
economic conditions in Iran, in the Middle East region, and round the world are not going to improve by mere economic
improvement and job creation in this or that branch of industry or by victory
of some people in recovering their bank deposits. The crisis of poverty and
unemployment will continue in various forms, and every day more and more people
in all over the world will be dragged into hunger and misery, even if me or my
family" and "my country" would be temporarily be secured from
the direct and indirect assaults of the system. One cannot win the struggle
against the upcoming devastating storms through waging struggle with short
sighted vision ofinterests or identity
of a section of society (like the women's movement or the oppressed nations
movement , etc. each separately fighting for their rights). Exploitation and
oppression dished out by the capitalist system is a universal and global
phenomenon, and its solution is a single solution which has to be fought for
through various battle fronts which must serve an actual single comprehensive
solution.

One important battle front in our
struggle to overthrow the Islamic
Republic regime and in opening the path for the communist revolution in Iran is
the anti-imperialist struggle. Today, this anti- imperialist struggle should be
particulary focused on supporting the widespread
anti-fascist movement in the United States initiated by the Revolutionary
Communist Party, USA(revcom.us) with
the slogan of " In The Name Of HumanityWe
Refuse To Accept A Fascist America " (refusefascism. Org).

WhatKind of Revolution? WhatKind of Leadership?

The situation is very fluid
and unpredictable, but a scientific understanding of what is the problem would
tell us with a great certainty that communist revolution is the only way
out." We, communists, represent the interests of all humanity and fight
for that. We will wage our battle to radically change the world on the basis of
the science of communism, and not on the basis of some bourgeois-democratic notions
and illusions. By communist revolution and science of communism we mean what is
put forward and forged by Bob Avakian in New
Communism and not different narratives of
communism or notions under the name of communism.

Today, in order to prepare for
such a revolution in Iran, nothing is more important than to bring this
emancipatory science of New Communism and the road map of our party for making
this actual revolution in Iran, to large sections of militant workers, rebellious
women, people of the oppressed nations (Kurds, Arabs, Baluch, Turks, Afghans,
Turkmen ...). Without this and without continuously increasing the number of
communists, we will not be able to build the leadership of the communist
revolution and its backbone.

The most important mass
campaign on the agenda for revolutionary communists is campaign to raise widespread
awareness of the New Communism and the communist revolution in Iran. In order
to carry this out, we should build society wide agitation and propaganda around
New Synthesis of Communism and works of
Bob Avakian (in particular the book of New
Communism) as well as the basic documents of the party, such as the Manifestoand Program of Communist Revolution
in Iran (published in February 2018) and also the draft constitution of
The New Socialist Republic of Iran (under publication). The advanced people
and a new generation of communists are needed to commit themselves to this
science in order to understand the situation and change the conditions through
hard work and efforts based on strategic goal of communist revolution.

We should put these questions
to the conscious activists and those in the forefronts of workers' movement
today: what is the place of Workers of the world unite" in your current
struggles? And whether the problem of the working class would be solved with
anything less than this kind of revolution and this kind of internationalist
vision? What is the meaning of proletarian internationalism regarding the Afghan
workers who are trapped in the lowest and most oppressed rungs of the working
class in Iran and where is proletarian internationalism in this regard in the
current struggles of the workers? What
position the workers in struggle should take regarding the oppression of women
under this regime generally as well as the conditions of women proletarians and
their super exploitation? How do they seed the relation between lack of rights and starvation of workers and their
families in Iran with crimes that the Iranian regime is committing in
Iraq and Syria? How are all these related to rapidly accelerating rate of water
shortage and environmental destruction and suppression of political dissent by
the regime?

Here the point is not to underline the fact that this kind of awareness
and discussions, must be taken to different social movements such as labor
movement and women's movement or other areas of struggle in the society. It is obvious
that we should do that. The fundamental point here is that in order to be able
to face the incredible situation arising out of intensification of internal and
international contradictions and before the situation reaches to an explosion point,
we should have strengthened and developed the communist leadership and back
bond for leading the revolution. Even to those who are not communist and are
fighting against the capitalist system with a goal lower than the communist
revolution, we should say to them too that the only way out of the upcoming
storms and maelstroms is to fight for the kind of society that our party has
envisioned and take up the road map that the party has put forward.

More than a hundred years ago,
Vladimir Lenin on the eve of the First World War wrote:

An oppressed class which does
not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated
like slaves in every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as
at present, on wage-labor, the oppressor
class is always armed Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat,
expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie.

Giving any other meaning to
May First is to elude the reality and run away from the necessity of
revolutionary transformation of the current circumstances. The following statement
by Bob Avakian is a basic principle of the
proletarian revolution:

We need a revolution.
Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit. Now, that doesn't mean
we don't unite with people in all sorts of struggles short of a revolution. We definitely need to do that. But
the proffering of any other solution to these monumental and monstrous problems
and outrages is ridiculous, frankly.

Future
Belongs to Those Who Dare to Take Big Leaps Forward for Emancipation!
Long Live Revolution, Long Live Communism!
Fight to Overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and Establish New Socialist Republic in Iran!
Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) May 1, 2018www.cpimlm.com